Why is my render is a completely different perspective than what I am seeing through the camera view?
A number of things happend when you hit 'Render', prior to actually rendering the frame. One of these actions is to re-evaluate any keyframes. If you have keyframes set on your camera or mesh, these will be re-positioned based on the keyframes - effectively undoing your manual positioning prior to hitting 'Render'. This is a common problem when objects unexpectedly jump back to their positions when rendering or changing frames.